In Turin, Chocolate's the Champion

By CORBY KUMMER

Published: February 15, 2006

THE streets of Turin may be overflowing with Olympics visitors for a few weeks, but they always overflow with chocolate. Perhaps in no other place in the world, and certainly no other city in Europe, do so many pastry shops and chocolate-makers roast and blend their own cacao beans. The cafes of Turin, still the world's most sumptuous and beautiful, are famous for serving the city's own hot-chocolate-and-espresso drink called bicerin, a fabulous layered concoction served in glass cups. It's easy to stroll down the arcaded shopping streets and sample bars and fancifully shaped pralines wrapped in foil and colored papers with appealing Art Nouveau designs.

But the chocolate par excellence -- the one that says Turin to the rest of Italy -- is the foil-wrapped mini-ingot called giandujotto. Biting into one isn't like eating any other kind of chocolate. The flavor of roasted hazelnuts comes through every bite, with the fruity high notes of fine Central American chocolate in the city's best. The depth of the hazelnuts balances the fruit of the chocolate, and anchors an experience that with the vinification of chocolate has become all too ethereal.

The mysterious potency and semi-addictiveness of the combination is familiar to anyone who has smeared Nutella on bread or simply dipped a spoon into a jar of it. Gigi Padovani, a journalist for La Stampa of Turin and author of a brisk history, ''Nutella, un Mito Italiano'' (''Nutella, an Italian Myth,'' Rizzoli, 2004), calls the spread the ''good blob.''

Nutella conquered the world soon after it was invented in Piedmont, the northwestern Italian region of which Turin is the capital, and went onto the market in 1964. But the combination of hazelnut and chocolate predated Nutella by a couple of centuries, and, like much brilliant inspiration, was born of necessity.

By the late 18th century (about 150 years after Cortes had introduced chocolate to Spain in 1528) Turin was an international chocolate capital, thanks to trade relations between the ruling House of Savoy and the Spanish court. Turin's chocolate producers exported 750 pounds a day to Austria, Switzerland, Germany and France, according to Sandro Doglio's ''Il Dizionario di Gastronomia del Piemonte'' (''The Dictionary of Piedmont Gastronomy,'' Daumerie, 1995). Swiss chocolate-makers came to Turin to learn their trade.

But supplies of chocolate from the New World became irregular during a naval blockade imposed by Napoleon in 1806 (the French then ruled Piedmont), and the city's chocolate-makers had to look to local products as surrogates. The world's sweetest, most prized hazelnuts grow in the misty hills of the Alta Langa, the southern region of Piedmont around Alba. Roasted and ground with chocolate, the nuts helped the chocolate-makers stretch a scarce import.

Chocolate plus hazelnuts conquered the city, and the combination soon took definitive shape in the form we know it today, an ingot with a rounded belly, wrapped in foil. Chocolate-hazelnut paste is tricky to mold, so it was shaped by hand, and named for the hat worn by the puppet Gianduja, a gluttonous, bibulous character who was Turin's contribution to commedia dell'arte. The chocolate-maker Caffarel introduced the candy at the carnival of 1865, and gave it its name in 1867. Powdered milk became a part of the standard formula after Daniel Peter discovered the technique for milk chocolate in 1875 and made Nestl? fortune.

The creation and its creator are still in place -- Caffarel bought the rights to use the Olympic symbol during the Winter Games here -- and chocolate remains important both as a regional symbol and an employer.

In recent history the carriage-trade chocolatier has been Peyrano, founded in 1915 Four years ago, the Peyrano family scandalized Turin's bon ton by merging with a Neapolitan family named Maione. (Turin and Naples, both historically subject to strong French culinary influence, in fact share Italy's most refined pastry and chocolate-making traditions, but the exuberant character of Naples could hardly be further removed from the restraint of Turin.)

The box may have lost some of its cachet, but the giandujotti are still excellent, as a trip to the unchanged, and somewhat dusty, store proved during a visit in early February as the city was anticipating the start of the Olympics. Peyrano recently opened a tiny tasting room and shop in an arcade somewhat hidden in the city's historic center; during the Olympics it offers special tastings and rich hot chocolate, which the main store has never sold.

Peyrano's ''giandujotto antica formula,'' with bomb?ase and crinkly foil, has a higher proportion of hazelnuts than its ''giandujotto nuova formula,'' which has cocoa butter added for easy machine molding and smooth wrapping. The old formula has a slight smokiness that Dr. Mariella Maione, in charge of marketing, says comes from the olive wood the company still uses to roast chocolate. The ''antica'' provides a definitive taste, with a satisfying amount of grit and a lingering aftertaste of fruit and roasted nut. It also has no milk -- the dividing point in the modern giandujotto competition.

''When people ask me the secret of our giandujotto,'' said Dr. Maione, who moved from Naples to Turin when her father became part of the business, ''I tell them there's only one: Torino.''